Best specialty for the organized nurse?

CrunchRN, ADN, RN · Feb 18, 2018

Research absolutely

K+MgSO4, BSN · Feb 18, 2018

House supervisor is about being able to constantly reset your priorities and have a million balls in the air and never drop one. If you want a role with a checklist and your tasks done by the end of the shift this is not the role.

E.g. you come onto a PM shift every bed is full in the hospital, you flex up everything that you can and the beds are not in the right areas.....you need an endo bed and the only options you have are ortho who are renowned for their attitude (the NUM has built her CNs in her image) and BMT where they have melt downs over any non BMT patient....while you are thinking what to do there the phone rings....regional LDU psych is full and there is a pt at 20hrs even though there is a separate mental health access and demand team it is your issue as they are in ED. You have 4 hrs before they breech and the COO will be issuing a please explain.

A ward calls they are having issues with the call bell system again and asking to close beds becasue they have 2 beds with no working call bells and you know that the tradesmen can't fix it and the outsourced company who provide the call bell system are refusing to do out of hours calls as the system needs replacing and they are looking for contracts etc.....(not that you have any power on that issue) do you close beds or What?

Another ward calls the CN mother has been admitted as a code stroke and her dad is refusing clot retrieval without talking to the daughter who is a nurse. You know staffing is poor up there this shift....you need to let her go but who can cover the CN role for the next 4 hrs? You remember a favour you did PACU CN last week and call it in and send a PACU nurse who used to CN on that ward to cover, allocate their ortho outlier back to the ortho ward, send them a stable endo pt who is waiting on a rehab bed tomorrow AM, send the endo pt to the endo ward.

Attend to a grad who has had a needlestick and having a melt down - she is going to quit nursing over this.....get a call from the woman's hospital next door (different health system)they have run out of XXL scrubs - can you grab a pair cause a tech is threatening to call the union. You call cath lab because they are all skinny and they have some....call next door back and meet at the common enterance to hand them over.

"Code" in foyer....you have to attend until an assessment is made all good just an old guy getting a bit dizzy, your off..

Heck 2 hrs have passed with a million other issues and what about the psych pt? "Terry? Get me a bed for this guy, he is voluntary and has top private cover" and boom...bed found....we had been assuming he had no cover for private mental health admission (socialised medicine here in Australia).

Now you've wanted to pop down to ED to check on the mum of one of the CN.....mum is in cath lab, you have a stroke bed available for after procedure. You send a tech up to her ward with her, get her belonging iut of her locker, organise a cup of tea for her and some dinner. Pop you head in and see the grad having a chat with your favourite ED nurse who has finished de-escalating the situation. Kid is rostered off tomorrow.

Fire off some quick emails to all of the relevant NUMs / DoNs thanking for assistance or highlighting issues. Curse the ortho NUM under your breath and hope she is retiring soon, allocate the beds you have, check critical care areas for any hot spots before night shift, inhale your salad, give up on healthy eating and get some chocolate from the vending machine....

because the engineering department has no spare beds and one of the wards just called looking for a new bed because theirs has just quit working.... you go up and trouble shoot it as you know that this batch has an error that can be fixed....sucess.

Top level wards call.....water pouring in both of the ceilings, water tank is overflowing. This you can't fix...call a Code Yellow Infrastructure, call ambulance service to go on Infrastructure bypass. Call executive on call and engineering. Move patients out of the affected rooms....to where??? The bed bound to PACU as they have no patient toilet, the mobile pts to DOSA area, urgent page to the techs...clear all the recliners out of DOSA, get the pts down with nurses. Set up your laptop there to assist with the 10 million issues.

Get the code yellow team up to speed....crap exec on call is the panicker....give her a list of tasks to do....call critical incident commander as there is not a single bed left in the metro area and ambulance service is trying to get you to take a patient. At this point you are bursting for the toilet and so thirsty as your water bottle is in your actual office. You see the rest of the code yellow team, including volunteer coordinator coming with the trolley 2 bottles of water and a sandwich THANK YOU...

LookForward · Feb 19, 2018

You may like OR..must be highly organized and detailed. make sure to prepare everything needed for he procedures

adventure_rn, MSN, NP · Feb 19, 2018

Definitely a niche specialty, but NICU nurses tend to be quite organized. Our workflow is generally very predictable, our shifts are pretty structured, and we manage most things down to the tiniest minutiae.

KelRN215, BSN, RN · Feb 19, 2018

I am a very organized person and my organizational skills have served me well in all of my positions- peds neuro, per diem school, home care manager, home infusion liaison.

What do you mean by "nurse recruiter"? This is typically an HR position and not held by a nurse.

PeakRN · Feb 22, 2018

Research and house supervisor aren't really something you can do as a new grad, regardless of how much organization may or may not play a part. While the ICU/PICU are generally pretty organized you are also catching the chaos from adults or kids who decomp in the hospital. Our BMT ICU and NICU are probably the most organized and predictable, although they certainly still have their moments.